Daily Chartbook #150

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1. Home sales. "Using April 2020 as a starting point, only existing home sales (orange) are down; new (white) and pending (blue) sales have managed to climb after falling dramatically over past couple years."

2. Cash buyers. "The share of all-cash deals rose to the highest since 2013 last year, while institutional investors, who usually account for many cash sales, retreated."

3. Homebuilder orders. "Analysts seem optimistic on a rebound in homebuilder order volumes over the next few quarters."

4. House price index. "December FHFA House Price Index -0.1% m/m vs. -0.2% est. & -0.1% prior … second consecutive monthly contraction."

5. Case-Shiller (I). "National home prices fell for 6 straight months up to December dropping more than expected (-0.51% MoM vs -0.40% MoM exp). This slowed the annual growth of prices to the weakest since July 2020."

6. Case-Shiller (II). "The headline national home price index is at its lowest since March 2022."

7. Q1 GDP. "We boosted our Q1 GDP tracking estimate by 0.4pp to +1.8% (qoq ar)."

8. Consumer confidence. "The actual print disappointed significantly (102.9 vs 108.5 exp), hurt by a big drop in Expectations (from a revised 76.0 to 69.7) while the Present Situation continued to rise (from 151.1 to 152.8)."

9. Labor market tightness. "Labor Market Differential surged 4.5pts in February, the third consecutive monthly increase, to 41.5, the highest level since April 2022. This supports a low unemployment rate."

10. Retail inventories. "Retail advance inventories were $743.1B in January 2023, up .3%* from December 2022 (seasonally adjusted)."

11. Imports/exports. "US merchandise trade deficit widened $1.3bn to $91.5bn in Jan 23."

12. Chicago PMI. Chicago's Business Barometer contracted for the sixth straight month.

13. Richmond manufacturing. The index "fell to -16 vs. -5 est. & -11 prior; new orders stuck in deep contraction, shipments sank, capex fell further into contraction, and employment fell further into contraction (now at lowest since May 2020)."

14. Story counts. Stories have gone from referencing "soft landing" to "no landing".

15. Rate cycle. "Our team now sees the Fed delivering the first rate cut in March 2024 (vs. December 2023 previously) and cutting rates at a slower pace of one 25bp cut each quarter."

16. Cash yields. "Cash [six-month T-bills] pays more than 60/40 portfolios for first time since 2021."

17. ETF flows. "Investors going back into government bond ETFs, with inflows reaching >$5.6 billion over past week ... on 1m basis, they've made up >1/3 of all inflows (aggregate bond funds also remain popular)."

18. Systematic positioning. "Systematic equity positioning is at the same levels where we saw prior bear market rallies lose momentum."

19. Equity downsizing. "Macro hedge funds have sold some equity exposure, which could help to explain (part of) the sluggish recent SPX performance."

20. CTA scenarios. "CTAs have sold longs over past weeks, but have more to sell. Latest projections via GS: 1 week scenario: flat sell $27bn, up sell $8bn, down sell $67bn...1 month scenario: flat sell $41bn, up buy $34bn, down sell $216bn."

21. Exposure plans. "The crowd continues to 'fade' this, but this has been a long term trend."

22. Fintwit. “52wk high in Goldman's Twitter sentiment index.”

23. TTM negative returns. "% of ETFs with negative returns over trailing 12M. Equities and bonds off the worst levels but still lingering at around 75%. Commodity losses shooting up."

24. Equity market valuations. "Even with the equity market down over 17% from its highs, these measures [CAPE, P/S, Tobin's Q, stock market-to-GDP ratio] remain in the top 85-90% of all their readings."

25. Earnings revisions. "1-month revision to I/B/E/S consensus earnings. MSCI World sectors, other global equity index aggregates."

26. Operational efficiency. "Companies with high operational efficiency seem to be performing well in this environment."

27. Leading indicators vs. earnings. "The spread between forecast and the consensus NTM EPS is as wide as ever and suggests the fat pitch is that EPS has a long way to fall and that will likely take several more months, if not quarters. This is our primary argument for why this bear market is incomplete."

28. Volatility. And finally, across asset classes, rates volatility remains the most stressed.

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